Three baseball entries are among the non-fiction titles on The New York Times as “100 Notable Books of 2010.”
- THE LAST BOY: Mickey Mantle and the End of America’s Childhood. By Jane Leavy. (Harper/HarperCollins, $27.99.) Many biographies of Mantle have been written, but Leavy connects the dots in new and disturbing ways.
- THE LAST HERO: A Life of Henry Aaron. By Howard Bryant. (Pantheon, $29.95.) Amid all the racism, Aaron approached his pursuit of Babe Ruth’s home run record more as grim chore than joyous mission.
- WILLIE MAYS: The Life, the Legend. By James S. Hirsch. (Scribner, $30.) In his long, fascinating account, Hirsch concentrates mostly on the baseball brilliance, reminding us of a time when the only performance-enhancing drug was joy.
Congratulations to the authors. Isn’t it interesting that of all the books on baseball, the three chosen are about athletes who played concurrently (for the most part) and that two of the three titles include “Hero.”
Here’s an interview I did with Hirsch on the Bookshelf earlier this year, as well as a profile from the NJ Jewish News. I expect to be chatting with Leavy in the near future. In the meantime, here she is on the Dec. 4 edition of Only a Game.
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